 |
I don't know what it is about bad comic strips that inspires boundless rage, but the fury in that comments section dwarfed my own. For some reason, the utter shit that fills the modern newspaper comics section is enough to send anyone into a fury, especially when we grew up knowing that it doesn't have to be that awful -- The Far Side, Bloom County, and Calvin and Hobbes proved that. And yet comics strips that have long outlived even the barest sense of cultural relevance -- like Snuffy Smith, created during America's short-lived fascination with hillbillies back in the 1930s, or Beetle Bailey, whose army life started back in World War II -- clog the comics page, preventing any potentially new and good strips from ever being seen.
Obviously, I knew I had a new mission: to make a second list of horrible comic strips that need to fucking die. While my first list fingered some of the worst offenders, you guys brought up a lot of other strips -- some I'd never heard of -- that need to die almost as fucking badly as the first 10 I picked on. If you don't see your most loathed strips on this list, check the first one; and if it's not on there, tell me in the comments so I can prepare for list #3.
10) Crankshaft
 |
Crankshaft is Funky Winkerbean creator Tom Batiuk's other comic strip, the one that hasn't yet been completely consumed by tragedy and death. Instead, there's about a 50/50 chance that any given Crankshaft you read will be a grim reminder of your own mortality OR an unfathomably shitty pun. Complicating the matter is that Dick Ayers's artwork for Crankshaft is actually quite good by comic strip standards. So even as you understand rationally that Crankshaft is terrible, subconsciously your eyes will be drawn toward it.
Then, before you know it, you're watching an unspeakably aged Crankshaft being wheeled out to a baseball game he's too far gone to comprehend. You will feel death creeping upon you, close your newspaper, and weep the bitter tears of the damned. (Or, if it's a strip like the one above, wonder if there's anything to the joke beyond "Crankshaft is an asshole.")
9) Baby Blues
 |
Baby Blues aspires only to be harmlessly banal. What takes Baby Blues beyond banality and into the realm of the detestable is the artwork. The jokes themselves are depressing enough, but they all become more nauseating as you slowly realize that the artist of the strip that's all about a woman pumping out babies is not, in fact, any good at drawing children. Oh, the babies in the strip are passable enough. It's as they age that the children begin to look bizarre. They seem strangely misproportioned, as if they were merely dwarves or adults drawn in varying perspectives. The adults... good Lord, the adults.
The mother and father in Baby Blues are horrid bobbling beasts with roughly 40% of their body mass focused in their enormous ghastly heads. Their bodies dangle vestigially from noodle-like necks, tiny hands gesticulating impotently at each day's meaningless drudgery. The mother's design is particularly stomach-twisting, her features all calculated to express only weariness and numb horror. Ha ha! She gave up her career for this!
8) Drabble
 |
Now, why did any self-respecting syndicate that could've bought the rights to any number of strips invest in a miserable fuckpile like Drabble? It wasn't the artwork -- Drabble is one of the ugliest comic strips still running, loaded with near-identical floppy-handed characters who, flounder-like, appear to have both eyes mounted on the side of their forehead (specifically, whichever side is pointed toward the camera). It couldn't be the writing, either. Drabble's premise is loathesomely unappealing, in theory centering on 19-year-old Norman Drabble. Norman is a repulsively immature man-child who still lives at home as he attends what I guess is some sort of community college with incredibly low standards. He behaves exactly like a 10-year-old, which the strip expects us all to find goddamn hilarious.
Norman is just disgusting and creepy, though. He shares a bunk bed with his brother Patrick, who can't be much older than 11, and expects his father to give him "belly buzzers." Norman's father Ralph is also pretty disgusting -- Homer Simpson described him aptly as "like me, but not funny" -- and lately all the strips seem to be about him. This doesn't make the strip need to die any less.
7) Mallard Fillmore
 |
Your great-aunt's dementia you can explain away by dint of her being 89 and the survivor of at least two strokes. I can't begin to guess at what the fuck is wrong with Mallard Fillmore creator Bruce Tinsley. The man simply does not appear to live in the same universe as the rest of us. Even when similar political strips like Doonesbury exhibit eye-rolling bias, you at least get the impression that Gary Trudeau understands what color the sky is. With Tinsley, I'm not so sure. The man appears to inhabit a political universe that's like a parody or a parody of a grim satire of ill-informed right-wing thought. Some strips are about concerns so narrow and specific that they're simply not intelligible unless you spend most of your spare time listening to talk radio.
The strip takes its name from its funny animal protagonist, a cartoon duck in a jacket with a huge bill. The premise seems to call for him being some sort of journalist, but most of the time the character is blatantly just Tinsley's mouthpiece. Mallard Fillmore has never featured an actual joke-shaped sequence in the years' worth of strips I've read.
6) Beetle Bailey
 |
Military life is an absurd thing that should not be hard to satirize in a comic strip. Mort Walker served in the Army in World War II, which surely gave him the idea to transform Beetle Bailey from a college loser strip into a military life strip. So why does Beetle Bailey read like it was written by some sort of moon man whose sole source of information about the U.S. Army was The Phil Silvers Show?
The answer appears to be "Mort Walker gotta eat." Beetle Bailey may have been a pre-Peanuts strip, but it's possibly one of the greatest testaments to the longevity a strip can achieve when designed solely with commercial interests in mind. The various soldiers who train endlessly for wars that never happen in Camp Swampy are little more than Smurfs -- the crappy Hanna-Barbera cartoon Smurfs, mind you -- but dressed in army fatigues. Every soldier from Rocky to Gizmo is defined wholly by a single character trait, ready to be slapped onto a collectible drinking glass or molded into 3-D plastic for a figurine. Beetle Bailey is not really a comic strip so much as a toy ad -- an ad for boring, incomprehensible toys that nobody wants to buy.
Tags: Comic Strips, Mean-spiritedness
More links from around the web!
